Proposal

The Cooperative Life & Spirituality Project

Summary

An increasing number of people care about cooperation, spirituality
and the life of this planet. Experiencing themselves as embedded in continually
expanding networks and environments they are seeking genuine, open and
constructive dialogue and mutual support in their work towards a better
world and spiritual wholeness - one planet on which all beings are at
home. This emerging participatory, cooperative culture can rightfully
be named Human Globalization: a grass-root movement that engages
a growing minority of people across the planet.

The Need:Values and practises have been generated so far
in “vertical structures”,
and this especially true in the context of life-guiding or spiritual/religious
structures of learning, practising and living. Whereas in many ways the
Internet has provided a new approach to transcending and surmounting ‘verticality’ (P2P,
Wikipedia, open source programming, sharing economy, distributed research,
Web 2.0) there is an immense lack in providing such a networked, cooperative,
dialogical structure to finding, communicating about and practising ‘spiritual
values’.

The Project:Creating a platform in the Internet (and producing a book alongside)
to popularize a basically networked, cooperative, dialogical spirituality
and providing a creativity-enhancing meeting place.

Funding Requirements:Ca. 2000 € per month for the first year plus ca. 8000 € for
additional investments in human resources and software/hardware.

Organisation & Expertise:Mushin has organised and managed seminars, events
and a community for several years. He is also well versed in webdesign
and writing. Participating in the spiritual culture online from the very
beginning he has good contacts in all areas needed and is able to find
the people where necessary to realize the project.(Please make
your comments and remarks here.)

The Need

Life enhancing values and practices
have been generated so far almost entirely in “vertical structures” and
this is especially true in the context of life-guiding or spiritual/religious
structures of learning, practicing and living.
A quick look at Google today delivers ca. 150 Million documents on spirituality
and religion. Random clicks on 50 of these reveal (in accord with my
researches in the times past) that all but one of these documents provide
one with a ready made theory/faith that one can only subscribe
to or not. Those of these documents that provide an insight into the
social structure behind the spiritual conviction espoused show all
of them to be vertical hierarchies. The values offered are monological
in essence and are given, top-down. The acquisition of spiritual values
is nowhere dialogical nor are these values essentially open to inquiry.
As in most monologues it is “take it or leave it”.
The only Website at present which clearly expresses and furthers basic
forms of dialogical spirituality is that of the P2P-Foundation. There
are further a handful of Websites (I can google some 700 of the 150 Million)
that further explore the possibilities of cooperative or dialogical spirituality
but those that I have accessed are all on a very high cognitive and theoretical
level.

In many ways the Internet has provided
a way to transcend and surmount ‘vertical
structures’ - P2P, Wikipedia, open source programming, sharing
economy, distributed research, Web 2.0 etc. This seems to be part of
an evolutionary movement towards a new quality in human relationships
and the organization of information, production and life in general.
As these horizontal, network-like – often called peer-to-peer – structures
grow there is at the same time an immense lack in providing such
a networked, cooperative, dialogical structure to finding, communicating
about and practicing ‘spiritual values’.

Hence the need for creating such
a structuring element – an Internet-Platform
with the purpose to foster the development of dialogical, cooperative,
participative values. This platform must be 'down-to-earth' and easily
accessed by most people and integrate cooperative, networking and participatory
approaches now available all over the net.

And finally, wherever dialogical, cooperative, participative
values are expressed they are expressed mostly in English. Therefore
the platform envisaged is to be a multilingual effort (German, Czech
and English to begin with.) (Please
make your comments and remarks here.)

The Project

The GoalMaking the views and values of the new emerging
culture – a culture
of dialogue, cooperation and participation – popular and creating
a medium for maximum interaction, communication, learning and collaboration
also across traditional and non-traditional boundaries.

ObjectivesWithin the next 3 months

develop the basic design & content of an innovative and open
Internet platform catering to the needs of people seeking to live according
to dialogical, cooperative, participative values – using software
and technologies that reflect these values.

find enough patrons, sponsors, contributors to guarantee that the
project can thrive at least one year.

testing the waters of cooperation with ‘spiritual
forums’,
magazines and online-communities like ‘zaads’.

work out the basic content of the book about
the “cooperative
turn” in spirituality and then contact prospective contributors
(Jorge Ferrer, John Heron, Ed Harris, Richard Tarnas, Christian de
Quincy, etc.)

Within the nexthalf a year to nine months:

The Internet-platform goes beta and is available
for the input of the audience at large; part of this is a low-key
PR-campaign in the blogosphere and on ‘spiritual forums’.

Cooperation deals with German, Czech and English off-line magazine
publishers.

Extra services are being developed (educational material, audio-chats,
Spirit Radio 1)

The book is ready for the editor.

In one year:

The Internet platform is running smoothly attracting big numbers
of users, interactors, creative people from all over Europe and the
world.

Continual development of further services and tools for communication
and cooperation.

The platform becomes available in further languages (EU-funding for
translations?)

In two years:

The platform belongs to the most popular places visited by spiritually
minded people.

Monthly evaluations of what has been achieved and what not, and possibly
necessary adaptations of the course to be taken are part of the process.

StaffIn the first three months the project manager will do most of
the work with the sporadic help of a secretary well versed in the three
start-languages. This is basically the phase of connecting with people
willing to contribute to the project with content, design ideas and finances,
and designing the basics of both platform and book.
In the second period the project manager will formalize the
collaboration with server/provider, designers, programmers, content-providers,
cooperation-partners and all other contributors. (Please
make your comments and remarks here.)

Financial matters

The realization of this project depends on funding for both the designing
stages and the stages of realization.
At this moment the plan is not to fund the platform with advertisement
but through patronage, sponsoring and as soon as that is feasible through
membership donations or fees.
Syndication of content (for instance the Spirit Radio 1 show), special
services (education, content), and other sources of income might also
help to finance the project in the future.

These figures are very much 'rule of the thumb', except project management
- 1500 € is a minimum that will keep me & my family alive.
Regarding the secretarial work: in general I would love to be able to
pay the secretary more than ca. 400 € per month.
Regarding translations: Since book & platform are to start in 3 languages,
translation is needed. The figures are not quite clear as the amount
of content to be translated is also not clear. The figures given are
probably a minimum.
Regarding hardware & software: audio & video equipment
and server-side software to manage streams is needed. I hope to find
(and chances are very good) a Server & Provider as a sponsor, nevertheless
some costs will have to be met (750 € being very much 'rule of the
thumb').
Regarding PR: I would like to get professional help on this and 3000 € is
prob. the lowest possible cost for this. The more money we can get for
this, the better. (Please
make your comments and remarks here.)

Outline of the Internet platform

Navigation

Subpoints

Explanation

Sponsors

A list + link etc. of those sponsors that would appreciate this

Learning

Online

"How to" courses

Offline

Seminars & Events

Community

Dialogue (Chat)

Audio & Text

Blog/Vlog

members have space
for own blog/vlog

Projects

members projects (for
instance open cooperative spirituality research projects)

Services

Calendar, seminars,
books, conferences, learning material, etc.

Ecology

information

projects

Media

Audio

Radio

Spirit Radio One

Video

Spiritual

Theory

Practises

About us

Philosophy, Mission, etc.

Contact

Form

Help

Persons

Speak to a volunteer
(member for some time) - Audio-Chat

Faq

General
remarks:

In all aspects it is obviously a co-created 'space', created
and maintained by the actions of many.

Members can use their own 'skin' and create their own lay-out
of the site

General outline of the book

Cooperative Spirituality - embedded in the richness
of life

1. Foreword/Introduction
2. Who am I? Who are you? What is between us?
3. Living in a Universe of Relationships, networks & systems
4. From the vertical view towards the cooperative/network vision
5. Communication, genuine dialogue & communion
6. Community
7. Work, practise and daily life

Motivation

If I trace the
strand in my development that put me on the trail of a dialogical,
participatory, cooperative spirituality than I would have to mention
my assistance of Sanji when she did a community building day at
a place called "Energy World" in 1996. This was my first
deep experience of what could be called "collective consciousness" – there
was a moment someone said, "I feel like we are one being with
40 heads and 80 arms and legs." Nevertheless at that time
I wasn't yet ready to truly understand what that implied because I
was still very much going for my personal enlightenment.

The development that consciously put me on the path I'm now on was a
question by one of my trainees during the first Living Field Transformation
Training in the summer of 2006, "How come, Mushin, you
never speak about the 'we'?" Being quite happy with what I
had achieved on my path, acting as a spiritual teacher to some people,
teaching what I had learnt – and helping people to partake of 'transpersonal
spaces' – this question hit me.
So I read Martin Buber "Ich und Du" and "Das Dialogische
Prinzip" which started putting me on the trail of a spirituality
that is neither in me nor in you but rather between us. Going
deeper I started to question my position as a 'spiritual teacher' and
inspect the way I run the community that I started here in the Czech
Republic some years ago. And then I stepped down...

Inquiring into the way spirituality makes sense in the world today I
stumbled across the incredible amount of abuse (power, sex, money) by
people that I had deemed, so far, as beyond all that, and I started to
look into the reasons for this. I found an important one in what I call "The
Patriarchal Temptation", and after some further heart-searching
put it all together in an article of the same title (published in abbreviated
form by the German magazine Connection last month).

All this investigating and the consequent change in my life and the seminars
has not been good for my financial situation, to say the least. It seems
generally that the people I was working with were much more inclined
towards a spirituality in the patriarchal mode where the facilitator
positions himself as the source of all the good things happening
and the competent authority for all good and true things in life & spirit.
And as I was getting more and more into the asking mode – "What
did you experience? How did that experience come into being? What do
you take to be its meaning? etc. – proceeding to inquire into
what is happening between us, I didn't fulfill the role-model of spiritual
authority anymore. Asking, "What are you competent in? Which
of your skills in interfacing with the spiritual do you want to enhance?
How could we do this together?" and so on, I lost two third
of the people that used to participate regularly in my seminars and trainings.

I've come to realize that this is probably because I haven't clearly
positioned myself in the spiritual arena. What I'm up to, and what 'cooperative
spirituality' is all about has to be clarified and brought to people's
awareness. This is one of the reasons I want to write a book (with contributions
of Jorge Ferrer, John Heron, Ed Harris, Richard
Tarnas, Christian de Quincy, etc.
asking them to write for 'real beginners') and create a website that
can function as an information–rich
platform for communication and collaboration of people inquiring into
a truly innovative spirituality that can leave the 'vertical school'
behind, and make the richness of deep values available to everyone.(Please
make your comments and remarks here.)

Philosophy

What the emerging participatory, cooperative culture is about:

It's about free access to knowledge (Wikipedia, open archives,
open content) and open sources (software, know-how etc.).

And it is about social synergies, collective
intelligence, Gaia & ecology,
heart to heart reality, open futures.

Cooperations across all kinds of borders are happening in science, business,
art, psychology, philosophy and spirituality - and it is moving from
being an 'accidental phenomenon' towards a growing trend. This seems
to indicate that in mankind as a whole the old spiritual dream of 'oneness'
is moving from a spiritual reality that formerly existed only in visions
and transcendent realization in more or less enlightened people to a
manifest reality in which ordinary people can participate. Being one
is moving from a potential to an actuality, or so it seems.

So as a loose, informal network of individuals and groups we are shaping
our paths in life from the creative wellspring within, evolving new forms
of living, spirituality and work appropriate to our day and age. At the
same time, we honor and let ourselves be inspired by, selectively and
adaptively, the spiritual practices and beliefs derived from a diversity
of sources, ancient and modern, worldwide.

To begin with we propose three interrelated criteria which apply in
varying degrees to each of us individually as we are continually awakening
the cooperative life and spirituality in and between us - not definite
criteria and therefore open to further dialogue and change:

We affirm our own original relation to the presence of the mystery
called reality. We find the source of authority within and do not project
it outward onto teachers, traditions or (holy) texts.

We are alert to the hazards of vertical spirituality,
in which very easily unprocessed emotional distress distorts spiritual
development, either by denying parts of one’s nature, or by
making claims that elevate one self or one's beliefs above others.

We are open to and love to engage in genuine dialogue about our
beliefs and convictions, we endorse collaborative decision-making about
spiritual and other practices undertaken together.

As autonomous and unique, yet also always interconnected
beings we sense ourselves to be co-creative collaborators of a participatory
culture emerging worldwide. To inquire into that culture, to support
and turn it into an forever stronger force, is among the most important
motives of a cooperative way of life and spirituality.